Since FRFI 305 went to press, US President Donald Trump’s ‘Liberation Day’ came on 2 April, on which he unveiled alarmingly high tariffs on all imports to the United States as part of his proclaimed plan toward ‘economic independence’ for the country. This is, as stated in FRFI 304, a declaration of economic war on the rest of the world by the Trump-Vance administration. On 5 April, these new levies will go into effect which include a 10% tariff across the board on all imports to the US, 25% tariffs on all motor vehicle imports, and even higher levies on particular countries including the EU at 20%, India at 27%, Vietnam at 46%, and China coming in the highest at 54%. China has already announced its retaliatory 34% tariffs on US imports, and talks of a united response from China, Japan and South Korea have begun. Following Trump’s announcement, the stock market plummeted to levels not seen since Covid-19, and fears of recession loom heavily within the US. This period of US imperialism will have profound consequences on the global economy, with the working class bracing itself to take the hit of soaring inflation, economic stagnation, and further austerity.
The first months of Donald Trump’s administration have signalled a new era of US imperialism. Faced with heightening economic crisis, the Trump-Vance administration is barrelling through red tape to carve out any political, economic and military edge it can get over its economic rivals in the European Union, Russia and China. Trump’s reactionary ideological attacks serve as the pretext to the economic warfare that he is waging on any threat to the interests of the US ruling class, both at home and abroad. The working class, as always, will foot the bill as Trump imposes a deluge of tariffs on imports and purges government programs in the midst of record-breaking national deficit. REAGAN GRAY reports.
Since the end of World War II, the US has extended its imperialist tentacles all over the world, taking up the role of global capitalist hegemon. Decades of growth from 1945 until the 1970s allowed the US to dominate the world economically and militarily, forging alliances with European imperialist countries which were in no position to compete with the United States in any significant way. However, after massive industrial outsourcing and free trade agreements of the 1990s, the Trump-Vance administration is bringing an end to the era of cooperation with the EU and is set on restoring the balance of power to get the US out of the ‘bad deals’ that it claims have led to its economic haemorrhaging and industrial stagnation. Trump’s way forward is the implementation of his new ‘reciprocal tariff plan’, which will mean that the US can slap levies onto countries at the same rate at which they have tariffs imposed on US imports. This dismissal of World Trade Organisation agreements is another nail in the coffin of the longstanding international law of treaties.
The Republican administration has already descended into a scramble to cut deals, claim new territory, assert control over global resources and demolish international law. This is indicative of a longer trend. The constant, violent redivision and redistribution of resources, land, economic and military power is the inevitable reality of imperialism, which will leave millions of casualties in its wake.
US imperialism shifts its tactics in Ukraine
A squabble on national television between President Donald Trump, Vice President JD Vance and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on 28 February was a window into the new administration’s strategic shift in relation to the EU and Russia. Up till now, the US has been militarily subsidising the EU through the NATO proxy war in Ukraine in order to counter Russia’s influence over the resource rich country. Trump and Vance have made it abundantly clear that the current situation is a lose-lose deal for the US. Ukraine joining NATO would further bolster unity and strength among the EU countries, benefiting the European imperialist states which already pose an economic threat to the US. Instead of pouring money into what Trump sees as a losing battle, both militarily and economically, he is pushing to force Zelensky’s hand and secure a ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine. Trump’s aim in this is to land development deals within Ukraine, gaining access to the ‘breadbasket of the world’, whilst simultaneously cosying up to Russian markets without the constraints of EU sanctions and regulations. The US will also be able to more effectively impede EU access to the abundant agricultural and mineral resources that Ukraine holds, which is crucial in the US’s plan to forge division and stagnation among imperialist European countries.
Republican Senator Lindsey Graham made the case plainly in June 2024 when he said, ‘they’re sitting on $10 to $12 trillion of critical minerals in Ukraine…they could be the richest country in all of Europe. I don’t want to give that money and those assets to Putin to share with China’. The alliance between Russia and China is a direct threat to US interests, especially if the US finds itself on the losing side of the war. By ushering in an agreement between Ukraine and Russia, the US sees the potential to drive a wedge between Russia and China, and edge out China, one of their foremost economic competitors, for valuable resources and trade deals.
Trump doubles down on Venezuela
Similarly, Venezuela has long been a prime target of US imperialism, as the country holds some of the world’s largest known oil reserves, as well as a plethora of sought after natural resources such as gold, nickel, iron, diamonds and lithium. The US has waged an economic war on Venezuela since the Bolivarian Revolution, when Hugo Chavez blocked the US’s privatisation plans of the country’s oil industry and began to redirect the profits into social programmes. Recently, Trump has initiated yet another wave of attacks on Venezuela, starting by deporting 199 Venezuelan migrants from the US amid a smear campaign falsely depicting them as criminals and gang members. Trump is using this racist demonisation of migrants as a justification for further economic war on the country, as he subsequently threatened to slap a 25% tariff on any country that buys Venezuelan oil. This, he says, would be on top of any existing levy as ‘punishment’ for Venezuela ‘purposefully’ sending ‘criminal’ migrants to the US. This serves to further isolate Venezuela by pressuring the country’s largest buyers of its oil and gas, which include China, India, Spain, and Italy, to abandon their trade deals with the country. The US Treasury under Trump has also ordered Chevron to cease operations in Venezuela in May of this year. This is all part of the US’s longstanding strategy to strangle Venezuela economically, undermine the socialist government under Nicolas Maduro, and re-establish a US imperialist backed regime so as to resume exploiting the country’s resources and people.
Trump’s economic and ideological warfare
Trump’s volatility and inconsistency serve to disorient the enemies of the ruling class. Abroad, this is seen in Trump’s constant threatening and walking back of tariffs, leaving countries to vie to be in the US’s good graces. Those who refuse to cooperate will be punished economically, or, in the case of Yemen – which refused to bow to US pressure and continued to block Israeli shipping routes to fight back against the Zionist genocide in Palestine – bombed.
For those who understand the world through the liberal lens pushed by bourgeois media, Trump is baffling. He can only be explained as an unhinged madman who is making a mess of ‘America’. This is exemplified perfectly by David Frum’s laughable analysis in The Atlantic which claims that ‘the American people need to reckon with the mess Trump and Vance are making of this country’s once-good name – and the services they are performing for dictators and aggressors. There may not be a deep cause here. Trump likes and admires bad people because he is himself a bad person’. Despite what the bourgeois media writes, it has never been the strategy of Trump, or any US administration, to look out for the working class or defend democracy. What we are seeing is the pursuit of the ruling class’s naked interests being expressed through increasingly aggressive and authoritarian means.
The bourgeoisie is keenly aware that it can no longer afford to pay the expenses necessary to hold society together without compromising its profits, and Trump, having no qualms bypassing the law, will defend its interests without hesitation. To do this, Trump planted the seeds during his first term, adopting the Tea Party ideology, further embracing a thoroughly reactionary American nationalism to consolidate the Republican party, and fixing the federal judiciary by appointing over 200 judges in four years, three of them Supreme Court justices. This time around, he wasted no time stacking his cabinet and purging anyone misaligned with his agenda.
Now, Trump has given Elon Musk the green light as the head of the Department of Government Efficiency to shake down the working class, and cut federal spending anywhere he can, making sure to be the most egregious and boisterous about targeting the programmes that hint at an iota of progressivism to appease his base along ideological lines. Musk has since started gutting federal agencies and programs, starting with a racist attack on anything related to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI), moving on to USAID, Medicaid services, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the National Institute of Health, the list goes on. Most recently, the purging has culminated in Trump’s order to dissolve the Department of Education entirely after firing 1,000 of its over 2,000 government employees. It has been clear from the beginning that education would be a primary target of the Trump-Vance administration.
Zionist attacks on universities
In 2021, JD Vance declared in a speech that ‘the universities are the enemy’, citing higher education institutions as breeding grounds for ‘woke left radicalism’. Since taking office, the Trump-Vance administration has predictably launched an attack on education from all sides, primarily motivated and fuelled by the racist Zionist lobby. In January, five universities came under investigation when Trump signed the executive order for ‘Additional Measures to Combat Antisemitism’ in a crackdown on universities where students were active in the Palestine solidarity movement. In March, the Department of Education expanded the investigation to 55 more universities for possible ‘antisemitic discrimination and harassment’, citing the Civil Right Act of 1964, which prohibits any institution which receives federal funding to discriminate based on race, colour, and national origin. The hypocrisy of the Trump administration banning anything related to DEI and then weaponising anti-discrimination laws in order to conflate anti-Zionism with antisemitism cannot be overstated.
The students within these institutions, of course, are the ones facing the full force of the attacks. On 8 March Palestinian graduate student Mahmoud Khalil was arrested by ICE officers at his home in New York and transferred to a detention facility in Louisiana where he remains in custody. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and the State Department are attempting to revoke his green card and deport him for his involvement in the pro-Palestine encampment at Columbia in the spring of 2024. In the weeks since, six more students and professors have faced similar arrests, detentions, and home searches, and Rubio has boasted of revoking over 300 visas from those deemed ‘adversarial to the foreign policy and national security interests’ of the country. The foundations of this repression, we must not forget, were laid by the former Biden-Harris administration, which demonised and criminalised pro-Palestine protests from the very beginning.
Opportunists re-strategise
In the midst of Trump’s attacks on nearly every institution that the Democrats claimed to value during their campaign, Biden and Harris have gone radio silent. So called ‘left-wing’ democratic socialists Bernie Sanders and Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez have risen from the ashes and taken up the task of rehabilitating the Democratic Party, touring the US and holding ‘rallies against the oligarchy’. This is just the first development in the series of tired opportunist tactics to pull a downtrodden electorate back over to their side following the destruction that will ensue over the next four years under the Republicans. Their political messaging has already conceded to Trump’s rabid anti-communist rhetoric, denying any allegations of subscribing to leftist ‘extremism’. They have managed to once again exploit their phony socialist façade and defend the Democratic Party programme: that of an utterly and irredeemably imperialist party which will always leave the working class out to dry to preserve a dying and desperate capitalist system.
As the crisis intensifies, so too will repression and the disintegration of the social fabric in the US. The resistance will only come from the working class, hope for which can be seen in the mass mobilisations against the attacks on migrants and Palestine activists. With thousands taking the streets, it is crucial that the US working class make the links between all struggles under capitalism and organise for socialism. It is the only alternative to the bloody imperialist pendulum of bourgeois democracy in the US.
Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! No 305, April/May 2025
